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Black Ghost of Empire
Black Ghost of Empire
Oct 5, 2024 3:07 AM

Author:Kris Manjapra

Black Ghost of Empire

A revelatory historical indictment of the long afterlife of slavery in the Atlantic world

To fully understand why the shadow of slavery haunts us today, we must confront the flawed way that it ended. We celebrate abolition - in Haiti after the revolution, in the British Empire in 1833, in the United States during the Civil War. Yet in Black Ghost of Empire, acclaimed historian Kris Manjapra argues that during each of these supposed emancipations, Black people were dispossessed by the moves that were meant to free them. Emancipation, in other words, simply codified the existing racial caste system - rather than obliterating it.

Ranging across the Americas, Europe and Africa, Manjapra unearths disturbing truths about the Age of Emancipations, 1780-1880. In Britain, reparations were given to wealthy slaveowners, not the enslaved, a vast debt that was only paid off in 2015, and the crucial role of Black abolitionists and rebellions in bringing an end to slavery has been overlooked. In Jamaica, Black people were liberated only to enter into an apprenticeship period harsher than slavery itself. In the American South, the formerly enslaved were 'freed' into a system of white supremacy and racial terror. Across Africa, emancipation served as an alibi for colonization. None of these emancipations involved atonement by the enslavers and their governments for wrongs committed, or reparative justice for the formerly enslaved-an omission that grassroots Black organizers and activists are rightly seeking to address today.

Black Ghost of Empire will rewire readers' understanding of the world in which we live. Paradigm-shifting, lucid and courageous, this book shines a light into the enigma of slavery's supposed death, and its afterlives.

Reviews

Black Ghost of Empire is a rare treasure of a book, that offers both powerful knowledge, and a new language with which to describe it. Manjapra's haunting journey takes the reader deep into neglected histories of oppression, while also illuminating the resistance and joy that Black people created within them. Above all the concept of ghostlining - such a succinct and accurate way of naming what we go through as people who tell stories about history - will stay with me

—— Afua Hirsch

This book will be celebrated as the first deep drill into emancipation legislations.... The architects of these legislations were skillful craftsmen who sought to build walls to contain the freedom they did not wish to create. It was intended to be a project of delusion and deception....[Black Ghost of Empire is] a massive contribution to the evidentiary basis for reparations. It shows that the enslaved blacks never surrendered; were never given the emancipation they demanded; never received the justice expected; and that their case for justice remains!

—— Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice-Chancellor of the University of the West Indies

A frequently unsettling counter-narrative to the congratulatory strand of abolitionist history

—— Michael Prodger , New Statesman

Black Ghost of Empire is one of the most important and timely books I've had the privilege to read. This lucid book details the substance and effect of unjust emancipation laws in Haiti, Britain and the United States, which rewarded slavery's perpetrators and punished its victims. Focusing on how these laws worked in practice, Manjapra's book strips back layers of myth about abolition and its afterlife. It draws clear lines between emancipation processes and their enduring intergenerational legacies of racial inequality

—— Professor Corinne Fowler, author of GREEN UNPLEASANT LAND

Black Ghost of Empire is a historical, literary masterpiece, which feels like the wrong word to describe a book so tangibly useful and appropriately terrifying. This book, as much as any I've ever read, is superglued to my consciousness, and literally changes how I understand every move in my life. This is different, and so so so necessary

—— Kiese Laymon, author of HEAVY

In this powerful retelling of the long story of emancipation, Kris Manjapra reveals why and how European and American nations worked to ensure that the end of slavery would deliver neither equality nor justice. It is a must-read that shatters self-flattering national myths

—— Craig Steven Wilder, author of EBONY AND IVY

Brilliant, bold, and wise, Black Ghost of Empire is a groundbreaking intervention on the long history of global Black reparations for racial slavery. Spanning emancipationist histories in North America, Africa, the Caribbean, and South Asia, historian Kris Manjapra offers a tour de force about the international and local implications of racial slavery's afterlife. With careful attention to the way in which a global Black emancipationist project has offered humanity a way out of the dead end of white supremacist history and politics, Black Ghosts of Empire is an essential global history of the deep roots behind our contemporary racial and political reckoning

—— Dr. Peniel E. Joseph, author of THE SWORD AND THE SHIELD

Kris Manjapra's Black Ghost of Empire illuminates the global systems of coloniality and the persistence of colonial empires' logics as they animate our present. At the crux of Manjapra's sedulous accounting is Black peoples' always present radical confrontations with enslavement and provisional freedom. Also detailed are the juridical and narrative modes used by white supremacist states to delay, to alter, to get around demands for full reparation and accountability. Then and Now

—— Dionne Brand, author of A MAP TO A DOOR OF NO RETURN

Kris Manjapra masterfully juxtaposes the present with the absent, revealing the truth of what once was, by illustrating vividly what was not. Using his own ancestral Afro-Asiatic lineage as the nexus upon which the narrative arch of enslavement and emancipation gyrate, Manjapra illustrates how the enslaved continued to compensate their enslavers through the injustices of so-called "apprenticeship", indenture and colonialism, long after their purported "emancipation" had occurred

—— Malik Al Nasir, author of LETTERS TO GIL

As this provocative book argues, emancipation brought with it a new set of injustices: continued prejudice, additional forms of oppression, and a lack of reparation... Kris Manjapra's account tells this longer story, and the ways in which these historical ghosts continue to haunt us in the twenty-first century

—— History Revealed

Magnificent ... Sophisticated analysis and beautiful prose ... The author vividly depicts a Europe grasping toward the future.

—— Michael F. Bishop , Wall Street Journal

Combines over-arching analysis and explanation with a ground-level reporter’s skill at narrating events and capturing character with vividness and compassion … a historian working at the height of his powers.

—— Michael Ignatieff , CEU Review of Books

With the skill of a twenty-first-century mother juggling numerous professional and caring responsibilities, Sarah Knott's Mother expertly pulls off a delicate balancing act. Knott's poignant personal memoir of pregnancy, birth, feeding and beyond encapsulates its bloody, milky, hormonal immediacy, whilst, at the same time, she finds in each moment an echo of history, a thread situating her among women - their bodies, communities and cultural practices - across centuries and continents.

—— Dr Rachel Hewitt

This lyrical book-one-third memoir, two-thirds history-guides us through centuries of pregnancy, childbirth, and infant care. Knott stitches her personal story to vignettes from the past and shows us how everyday mothering differed in time and place. With stunning prose, she gives us the sensory shorn of the sentimental. A riveting read

—— Joanne Meyerowitz, author of 'How Sex Changed: A History of Transsexuality in the United States'

An original and important account of a universal but neglected experience. Mother powerfully conveys the thrilling, bewildering, and fuzzy-headed atmosphere that surrounds pregnancy and childbirth, and offers a fascinating glimpse into the world of our mothering predecessors.

—— Herald

A useful corrective that brings us closer to a more accurate history of Western science - one which recognises Europe, not as exceptional, but as learning from the world

—— Angela Saini, author of Superior

The righting of the historical record makes Horizons a deeply satisfying read. We learn about a fascinating group of people engaged in scientific inquiry all over the world. Even more satisfyingly, Horizons demonstrates that the most famous scientists - Copernicus, Darwin and Einstein among them - couldn't have made their discoveries without the help of their global contacts

—— Valerie Hansen, author of The Year 1000

A provocative examination of major contributions to science made outside Europe and the USA, from ancient to modern times, explained in relation to global historical events. I particularly enjoyed the stories of individuals whose work tends to be omitted from standard histories of science

—— Ian Stewart, author of Significant Figures

A wonderful, timely reminder that scientific advancement is, and has always been, a global endeavour

—— Patrick Roberts, author of Jungle

This is the kind of history we need: it opens our eyes to the ways in which what we know today has been uncovered thanks to a worldwide team effort

—— Michael Scott, author of Ancient Worlds

An important milestone

—— British Journal for the History of Science, on Materials of the Mind

The freshest history of the strangest science

—— Alison Bashford, author of Global Population, on Materials of the Mind

Ambitious, riveting, Poskett tracks the global in so many senses . . . vital reading on some of the most urgent concerns facing the world history of science

—— Sujit Sivasundaram, University of Cambridge, on Materials of the Mind

Terrific . . . [Makes] a substantial contribution to understanding the universalizing properties of science and technology in history

—— Janet Browne, Harvard University, on Materials of the Mind

Horizons forces me to think outside my Eurocentric box and puts science at the centre of world history

—— David Reynolds , New Statesman, Books of the Year 2022
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